Alternatives To Twapper Keeper

First off, on January 6th 2012, the TwapperKeeper.com site, and all related archives, will be shutdown with no access to any existing archives. Please ensure you have compiled all of your data by this date.

What should you do if you wish to continue keeping an archive of tweets, especially for event-related tweets which seems to be one particularly valuable use case?

One solution is to use Twapper Keeper! Or perhaps I should say Your Twapper Keeper, the open source version of Twapper Keeper. As part of the developments to the Twapper Keeper service the software was made available under an open source software licence in order to decouple the provision of the service from the software used to provide the service. Anyone, therefore is free to download the software from the Github repository and set up their own Twitter archive.

For those who have warned about the risks of dependencies on third party services for which there are no formal contractual agreements this example perhaps demonstrates the value of funding the development of an open source alternative. But is this really the case? Will institutions be downloading the software in order to be able to manage their own archives? I see no evidence that this is having, but I’d like to be proved wrong.

Perhaps this is a case for which an easy-to-use proprietary solution is all that is needed, especially since the content is typically not created primarily be members of a specific institution but, in the case of event-related Twitter archives, attendees at an event who are likely to be based across the sector rather than at a single institution.

On the Event Amplifier blog in a post entitled Goodbye Twapper Keeper Kirsty Pitkin explores the possibility of using Hoot Suite, the company which purchased Twapper Keeper, for managing Twitter archives. However Kirsty has described the financial implications of such a decision:

A Pro customer (paying $5.99 per month) can archive only a measly 100 tweets, or purchase a bolt on to archive up to “100,000 tweets and download all keyword related Twitter messages”. When I attempted to upgrade my plan, I found that 10,000 additional tweets would cost me $10 per month, and 100,000 additional tweets would cost me $50 per month.

Martin has helpfully provided a video which is available on YouTube and embedded below which describes how to use his solution.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these options proves the most popular solution across the sector: the open source solution, the subscription service, the Google solution or possibly an approach I haven’t described. Which will you be choosing?

8 Comments

Brian, we have been using tweetbackup.com, which allows you to export your tweets in any of the following formats: csv file, RSS, text file, html. An alternative is tweetake.com, which allows you to backup as a csv file only. Have never used twapper keeper, so am not aware of what it might have offered over and above tweetbackup.com.
Regards,
Eddie Byrne,
Dublin City Public Libraries

Hi Eddie
Tweetbackup and Tweetake (along with Backupmytweets, which I use) can me used to backup tweets posted from your own Twitter account. Twapper Keeper was used primarily to backup tweets for a hashtag which may have been posted by multiple users. Twapper Keeper was often used to keep a record of event tweets, such as #ILI2011.

We’ve got a beta version out at the moment in the EPrints Bazaar, but we’re testing the final version to make sure that it can resiliently handle sustained high rates of tweeting and large collections of millions of tweets.

There is still more value to be gained from hashtag archives. In many cases they are as rice if not richer resources than the official conference proceedings (an advantage of using Google Spreadsheets is they sit in the cloud and can be used as an open data source for others to mash and hack).

Hi Brian,
Been thinking for a while about twitter in education – especially stuff like twitter journal clubs – http://www.twitjc.com/ – as an example.
So I made a WordPress plugin to archive tweets, and display them nicely – so it’s a storify and twapper keeper – although if you want to store a very popular term – it’s probably not going to be fast enough (it searches once every two minutes – as long as some one is on the site).